Thursday, March 29, 2012

Reeling White House Steps Into Health Care Breach

Truly priceless! The Dems are beating up on the Obama Administration for its inept defense of Obamacare but Obama fires back with the bitter truth that Obamacare and its signature mandates were hatched by Republicans. Obama is correct. The Heritage Foundation, the Republican neocon and big government think tank, invented the mandate, lobbied for the mandate and many Republicans supported it. The gaming tables at the DC Wheel of Fortune includes Republicans and Democrats who thrive on the corrupt crony capitalist system of perpetual patronage and rent seeking.

The Obama White House, beset by a barrage of liberal criticism over an allegedly inept defense of its signature domestic policy achievement, on Wednesday defended the health care law's constitutionality not on legal grounds but on purely partisan ones.
“The individual-responsibility provision was originally a Republican idea,” said White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest at the daily briefing, altering the common terminology “individual mandate” to the theoretically more politically palatable “individual responsibility.”
Earnest noted that “conservative Republicans” at the Heritage Foundation originally came up with the concept of the mandate in 1988 and 1990. Conservatives have since said the individual mandate was a response and alternative to a mandate on insurance companies during debate over the approach to universal health care in Bill Clinton’s presidency. In truth, it was conceived as a policy alternative long before Clinton was elected.
Earnest also claimed that Obama's Affordable Care Act drew its policy inspiration from GOP front-runner Mitt Romney’s health care law in Massachusetts. Earnest called Obama’s national health care law a “bipartisan idea” designed to confront “difficult health care challenges.”